Let’s say we are teaching a learner to wash his hands. Probably, we’ll start by creating a list of the steps the child will need to learn to wash his hands. The first step in this sequence might be to turn on the water, and so on. Often, practitioners will measure how well the child is doing by measuring the “prompt level.” For example, a child might require a physical prompt to turn on the water. In this case, the therapist or parent might have to hold the child’s hand to show them how to turn on the water. After some teaching, the child might do it with just a gesture towards the faucet or a verbal reminder to turn on the water. Finally, we hope that the child turns on the water without any prompts. This allows the practitioner to determine if the child is improving or if he or she needs less intrusive prompts over time.
I find this to be an extremely common measurement procedure in practice, but when I look through the new edition of the White Book, this procedure isn’t in there. This book is generally considered the flagship textbook in Applied Behavior Analysis. Why does our flagship textbook not cover such a commonly used procedure? I suspect it is likely because it is a very poor way to measure progress.
I don’t know how the use of prompt-level data became so frequently used in practice. I used it myself for many years. But later, I realized there were much, much better ways to measure progress.
Prompt-level data is problematic for the following reasons:
- A prompt is not the child’s behavior, but the teacher’s behavior. The teacher is the person who determines what prompt to use and when to use it. This data often varies dramatically based on who is doing the prompting.
- Prompt-level data often interferes with good teaching by requiring the therapist to record a lot of data instead of focusing on the learner.
- Effective teaching requires the therapist to completely focus on the learner and to provide the reinforcement at just the right time. That feedback is the primary mechanism required for teaching. This procedure makes the teacher focus on the prompt rather than the reinforcement.
- Prompt-level data can often exaggerate progress. It is relatively easy to show a reduction in the intensity of prompts, but it can be difficult to obtain true independence.
What do to instead? Simple. Just measure each step in the list of skills and record if the child did it independently or did not do it independently, regardless of what the teacher did to help. This produces much more reliable data, and makes it easier for the teacher to focus on teaching.